This is correct! The value of epi – pi is 19.999099979 (plus a trailing infinite list of numbers). I strongly suspect this is just a coincidence — after all, why not pie – pi (19.317565) or pie – e (19.740875)? If you pick enough numbers, one of them is bound to come out near an integer coincidentally. Hoagland bases his whole "Face on Mars" nonsense on this numerology fallacy.

It’s funny how coincidences seem like more than they are. Our brains are wired for that sort of thing.

Comments (55)

monkey

Um…I like the thoughts and I find interest in them…but….am I missing part of this….is ACM par tof the joke? Sorry….perhaps a rediculously unintelligent way to start a post link but, oh well. I gatz ta no

Sometime in the 1970s, Martin Gardner presented a similar expression in an April issue of Scientific American â€“ and the joke was that the result was an integer ( =x.99999999 â€¦.). In those days it was difficult to find the solution to an arbitrary degree of precision. Actually the result of the expression diverged from a series of 9s after only a few digits.
I have to go find that article!

This is a wierd coincidence: The Riemann Hypothesis predicts a regular pattern primes might display in their distribution,which turns out to correspond with quantum properties of atoms. If you compare a strip of zeros from Riemann’s critical line, they seem to correspond to energy levels predicted by quantum physicists in the nucleus of heavy atoms.

Some coincidences are even weirder, and maybe even hint at something going on underneath: try e^(pi * sqrt(163)), for instance. I’m not a number theorist, but apparently they can tell you why it turns out the way it does. (Kuwaiti Demon — is this expression what you were referring to?)

Now, that this near integer diverges as quickly as the 1/10,000s place is unimpressive I work in an industry where we measure availability of ourt systems at the 1/1000000 place (that’d be .99999x – or 99.999x % available) and worry when that 6th digit isn’t also close to 9.

John B. Sandlin: Aw, I preferred ourt systems. More exotic. Random ‘t’s from the Ourt. Or is that the definition of comets? Sorry, long day.

Being a mere BioBABlogee, I am impressed with the precision of your equipment. Here’s a bit of inanity this group may chuckle over.

I once worked with a small group of fellow biologists in a federal chemistry lab. One day the Lab Quality Assurance officer paid my boss (also a biologist) a visit to discuss data management issues and brought up the term “significant figures”. Without blinking, my boss replied, “Oh, ALL of our figures are significant.”

I don’t see anything special in the number derived except the digits all are 9s or 0s. Pi itself is much more interesting in the first 10 digits you get all 10 digits. Of course this is in the base 10 number system which only appeals to us because we have 10 fingers. In base 3 or hexadecimal or octal you’d get a different pattern. e and pi are sort of opposite sides of the same coin so the fact you get a non random pattern isn’t all that stunning to me. As for Hoagland maybe we should take up a collection so he can get some meds, I mean he’s either a flake or insane or some combination of the two! I can’t believe anyone actually pays to buy stuff he wrote! I’m surprised my little joke of the ‘face’ being a ‘butte’ hasn’t caught on. Of course I always thought the Great Lakes Huron and Erie were funny because one sounds like ‘hear’ and the other like ‘ear’.

When I took geophysics, we would cancel out the pi that results from the earth’s orbit in various geophysical calculations by approximating a year as pi x 10^7 seconds. Obviously you don’t want the guys who do spacecraft trajectories using this trick, but it’s close enough for the order-of-magnitude type calculations that we did in undergrad planetary.

I was gonna make some pithy comment about those stupid emails that have you go through some silly math gymnastics and arrive at some result that sounds impressive or surprising. But then you all start throwing around imaginary numbers, natural logarithms, etc., makes my comment seem kinda sophomoric, so I’m gonna just keep my mouth shut…

The number of seconds in a tropical year is about 3.1557 x 10^7 seconds, remarkably close to pi x 10^7. If the second was just a little “longer”, then they would match, as long as the earth doesn’t slow down.

In SI units, the acceleration of gravity near the surface of the earth is very close to the SQRT(pi). Hmmmm…

Finally, we know where Ol’ McDonalds Farm is: on the Argand Plain [sic] about 0.6517 units from the origin (wherever THAT is), 38.22 degress east of south. Check out e^(i^(e^(i^0))). Oh, and the imaginary component of the farm has a magnitude close to (slightly larger than) the mass-energy of the electron in MeV. Ooooo…

Thanx all for some very interesting posts. In response to Samuel’s hint of a deeper reason that e^pi > pi^e, let f(x) = ln(x)/x. Then f'(x)=(1-ln(x))/(x^2).
f'(x)=0 if and only if x=e, which yields a maximum at x=e for all positive values of x. So if A>0 and A not equal to e, f(e)>f(A)
ln(e)/e>ln(A)/A
Aln(e)>eln(A)
ln(e^A)>ln(A^e)
e^A>A^e
e^pi>pi^e is a special case.

I know one fact, that if you tetrate (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration) e-rt(e) (The base-e root of e) to infinity, the result is e, but if you tetrate anything higher than that to infinity, be it just 10^-1000000000 higher, it goes to infinity. (Well, I actually found this out from experimentation.)

1) Click on the image. It will take you to the actual comic. The image is only the first of three frames.
2) The joke in a nutshell: e^pi – pi = 19.999099979, which is very very close to 20. So close that if you don’t know better, you’ll feel tempted to believe you’ve introduced some rounding error on the calculation. The math guy exploits this to drive the computer guys from ACM nuts trying to find where they were making the mistake.

In reply to Adam:
“Also, I hear the 4th root of (9^2 + 19^2/22) is pi.”
I have no mathematica, but I can do high precision calculations. Found out it is approximately pi up to the 9th digit. Aproximately equal is still unequal, of course.